themangokid(manofoneway) created the Discord server around a year ago and he managed to build a growing community.XvaySwas working on a gatherbot for Discord in the meantime and just finished his great work.

Hey everyone, I need to officially announce this. For a long time my number one priority for Soldat was to get it on Steam. Because the attention of gamers is on Steam. We will get new players from there easily and keep Soldat alive and happy. But... It's been too long and I see nothing will come out from waiting.

I talked with Shoozza over the past weeks and he agrees with my intentions. We also see that the current dev team is going nowhere, despite their best efforts.

We decided that we want to ship Soldat 1.7.1 (with some fixes as Soldat 1.7.2) on Steam for FREE (Windows only first).

The release date has been decided to be 21st December 2017. So it's also the date were Soldat will become 100% free both on soldat.pl and Steam (YES it will still work without Steam). So thank you, everyone that has registered and supported me and the Soldat infrastructure and people involved. We wouldn't have made it without you. But it is time to retire ...

For almost a decade, the only way of querying the Soldat Lobby to see what servers are online has been to use an aging, proprietary, protocol over sockets which is inconvenient if you want to build an app to make use of lobby data.

To make building 3rd party apps or other tools for Soldat easier, I just implemented support for getting and filtering the currently online Soldat servers over JSON+HTTP, slightly similar to the API for KAG.

For a long, long, time Soldat has been ugly – certainly since its creation, but as games have become more and more beautiful, we've stayed behind the times and the disparity has grown larger. When a new player opens up Soldat, not only is he met with a convoluted and confusing menu, but also graphics straight from 2000, which even for the time weren't good.

With 1.8 we are going to rectify that. Hand-painted sceneries and textures were the way to go, since limitations poised by the old engine rendered many conventional methods useless, and the art team (which consists of Monsteri) doesn't have enough time for 3D pre-renders. The goals of the new art direction are a cohesive style, much improved visuals, and improved readability of the game elements.

The style will be a mix of cartoony and painterly visuals with a bucketload of grit, but decently realistic shapes and objects. All colliding things – that is to say, polygons and colliders, will have thick outlines. ...

So today I've decided that it's high time to create the channel for all THD games (THD stands for Transhuman Design which is MM's company). Chat there is meant to be about all THD games - Soldat, KAG, Butcher and others that kind of fell into oblivion over the years.